


Interlude I: and the end wasn't funny

by paperclipbitch



Series: not the smallest thing [2]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst, Crushes, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pre-Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-19 23:44:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3628656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Superpowers AU.</i>  Anne can’t imagine living with another person anymore; not when brushing shoulders in the kitchen could result in hospitalisation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interlude I: and the end wasn't funny

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Tunnels_ by Johnny Flynn.]
> 
> So, I'm working on the next long part of this AU, but it occurred to me that I'd like to do little interludes in between the main big bits, looking at characters/POVs that I'm not going to get to just yet, but want to explore. So here's a little backstory/stuff for Anne, set a few days after _with symphonies and thoughts like sharpened darts_ , and... this probably won't make sense unless you've read that tbh.

_I've been limping from tunnels since my original sin._  
\- Johnny Flynn

 

In the beginning, it was mostly funny: carrying home groceries got easier, lids twisted off bottles and jars like they’d never been sealed shut in the first place, and no one needed to come over and help when she decided to rearrange her living room furniture.

And then it wasn’t funny anymore. Doors ripped off their hinges, furniture ripped like paper under her hands, and the press of fingertips to a shoulder, _I can’t talk about this now, Marguerite_ , broke the bone underneath.

Anne was weak, when the men with every last cliché of masks and brutality came for her. One of them could move faster than she could see, though she didn’t know that at the time; in any case, she wouldn’t have fought back. She was curled up in her living room, dressed in the tatters of her clothing, hands knotted together and knees held to her chest, where she’d been for three days, terrified of touching anything. The floorboards had warped around her, and most of her furniture was in pieces; perhaps someone had been calling her, but her iPhone split weeks ago, her rarely-used landline phone still cracked plastic. They could have asked, her kidnappers, and Anne would have gone with them freely.

In the weeks that passed after that, shifted from basement to basement, cold and tired and no longer sure what she was even _hoping_ for anymore, Anne wondered if anyone missed her, if the speed at which she’d been cutting ties had left anyone worried when she finally vanished. There’s nowhere you can stay, once you go from being yourself to simply being _the woman who broke her ex-girlfriend’s shoulder_. It doesn’t matter that maybe she’d been hoping for some kind of reconciliation, because there’s no way back after that. 

There’s a lot about that time she’ll never talk about, or maybe she can’t talk about it, and Anne still isn’t sure what to do with daylight. She feels faded, cracked, from her months in captivity, perhaps losing her mind, perhaps not. Only time will tell that one, she thinks, or perhaps Athos, if the way the others talk about him is true. He’s been in what seems like a coma upstairs since the day Anne arrived in this house, the one that looks like a normal suburban home of someone affluent enough to own a whole house in London, but is in fact as far from normal as it’s possible to be.

“Should we be worried about him?” she asked last night, d’Artagnan ordering Chinese without needing to look at the takeaway flyer – “two lots of special menu C, three lots of forty-two, two of thirty-six, and extra sixteen, please. Yes, hi, it’s d’Artagnan” – and the others sprawled around as though none of them had homes to go to either.

“I took him up a bottle of that fancy vodka he likes about lunchtime,” Aramis told her, “and he cracked an eye open and called me something offensive, he’s fine.”

Even Treville, who Anne thinks is loosely some kind of leader and probably the most sane person here, was nodding, as though this was all perfectly reasonable. Perhaps it was.

Constance, curled at one end of the sofa with _The Noonday Demon_ in her lap, looked up long enough to roll her eyes at Anne and mouth _men_ at her.

Today is a Sunday, the house half-empty, quieter. Athos is still asleep or drunk or unconscious or vegetative, Treville is locked in his office, and Porthos apparently has an Ikea trip with his housemates. Anne can’t imagine living with another person anymore; not when brushing shoulders in the kitchen could result in hospitalisation. Everyone who comes here is dangerous to some degree or another, Anne thinks, and they don’t seem outwardly afraid of her; still, they’re careful around her, as she forgets herself and shatters crockery between her hands, dents walls with a misplaced touch. Treville promises he can help her control this, and Anne wants to be as optimistic as she knows she once could. Now, the woman who once put a hand through a granite counter, she’s not sure she can afford optimism any more. 

“Ah, you’ve discovered our miserable excuse for a patio,” says Constance behind her, and Anne jumps, reminds herself of her bearings, and manages not to break the wooden chair she’s perched on. Constance grimaces apologetically; she’s carrying two steaming mugs, and puts them on the weather-beaten table beside Anne, pulling out another of the garden chairs for herself. “We all keep saying we’ll do something about having an actual garden out here, but we’ve done bugger all about it.”

Anne carefully picks up the mug nearest her; a tin one, covered with thin pale enamel. An experiment in different materials, she assumes, but she doesn’t mention it. “It’s… definitely got a certain ambience,” she replies, and Constance laughs.

“When he first got here, d’Artagnan used to practice moving furniture around out here so if it exploded we wouldn’t keep having to pick bits of stuff out of the walls,” she explains. “And Aramis sneaks out here to smoke and we have to pretend we don’t know, and… well, Athos doesn’t know we have a patio, I’m not sure he believes in going outside unless it’s an emergency.”

Anne smiles, and sips her tea, which is good; made exactly the way she likes it, although after so many months on water and protein bars tossed to her in darkened rooms anything tastes wonderful.

“Why are you here on a Sunday?” she asks instead, trying for a light tone that she’s not sure entirely hits the mark. Most of the others have lives outside of here, to some degree or another; Anne can’t remember what it was like to have something other than raw terror in her every fingertip.

Constance lifts a shoulder. “Porthos did ask me to tag along with him and Alice and Samara on their Ikea trip, but I learn from experience.” Her lips curl. “Though he can put something together perfectly after looking at the instructions once, he did our entire living room when we moved in.”

“I could’ve done with him when I moved last year,” Anne reflects. Those were the days before she would’ve been able to carry the sofa up the stairs by herself; they all struggled with it, and later she and Marguerite and Louis drank cheap wine and fucked up her bookshelves until they had a haphazard structure and a handful of leftover screws that weren’t supposed to be leftover.

She was happy then; uncomplicatedly, gloriously happy. But that was another life, one that she’s left in more pieces than the door that she finally slammed in Louis’ shouting face, and what Anne has now is this: a garden full of shattered cheap furniture and abandoned cigarette butts, a tin mug of tea with the sides denting from the press of her fingers, and Constance, in jeans fraying open across the knees and one of Athos’ scarves tied around her head.

Constance’s expression is careful. “Is there… is there anything we should go and get for you? Clothes, keepsakes, photos…”

Anne shakes her head; she burned all those bridges – or snapped them in her hands, anyway – long before she was snatched out of her home.

One day, Anne’s going to have to tell them the whole truth about her kidnapping, but she isn’t ready for that yet. She can’t say it to herself, let alone aloud.

“Besides,” Constance says, continuing their earlier conversation as though the last few moments didn’t happen, “I thought you might want some company. Athos isn’t much fun even when he _isn’t_ trying to crawl inside a bottle.”

“I’m used to being on my own,” Anne replies, quickly; it’s a kneejerk reaction, partly from ingrained politeness, partly from the fear that’s become second nature in the last few months.

Marguerite used to say that Anne was _passive_ ; she wasn’t bitchy when she said it, winding a lock of Anne’s hair around her fingertip, her smile soft, but the word struck and stuck and it stings back sometimes when she’s trying not to think about it. It’s true, that Anne used to be the one standing back and letting other people do the running, do the chasing: Marguerite was the one who slid over a folded piece of paper with her number after they’d worked together for several months, when Anne was still trying to decode whether they were flirting or not. Anne isn’t passive, but she’s a thinker, and she likes to take her own time to figure things out. At least, she tells herself this, when Constance shifts in her chair to face her and smiles something honest and bright that stretches a scoop of freckles across her nose that Anne hasn’t noticed before, and her eyes are bright with sunlight and the vestiges of yesterday’s mascara. Even before her life changed, Anne wouldn’t have known how to approach Constance: the thought is a little bitter, a little consolatory, a little relieved.

“I know,” Constance says softly, and her expression is sympathetic but not pitying. “But you don’t have to be, and, frankly, it’s boring being the only girl around here. Unless Milady shows up, I suppose, but, well.”

“Who’s Milady?” Anne asks, happy to let the moment that wasn’t a moment pass.

Constance rolls her eyes. “That’s a story for when I’m drunk. And for when Athos is drunk, but, well, that’s always.” Her mouth twists. “Actually, Milady’s the _reason_ Athos is always drunk.”

Anne briefly wonders if everyone’s lives are always this complicated, or if the quirk of DNA that makes someone capable of more than most humans also somehow manages to tangle the rest of their existence too. Perhaps Porthos will know, if she asks.

“Anyway,” Constance continues cheerfully, “I brought over about ten DVDs because Treville won’t let us have Netflix after that time Athos ruined _Breaking Bad_ for him, and I’ve got a pizza we can bung in the oven, what do you say?”

Anne should tell her to go; these people can help her, but they don’t have to be her _friends_ alongside it. Anne had friends once, and she hurt them, and now they’re gone. She should nip this in the bud, not look at the way Constance is biting her lip but smiling, a little hopeful, and there are dimples caught in her cheeks and she was so gentle when Anne all but fell into the car, frantic and scared and fairly sure she’d broken Porthos’ arm from clinging on so tight while he pulled her out, and Constance said _it’s okay, everything’s going to be okay now_ and the bruises on Anne’s arms were shrinking and, for a moment, she almost believed her.

“I-” Anne’s voice catches.

“C’mon.”

Constance stands up and holds out a hand, nails painted a buttery summer yellow, and the last time Anne touched anybody was when Porthos pulled her out of her concrete cell and she clung to him because she _needed_ to, and bruises sprang purple from his skin. He didn’t make a sound, didn’t pull away, but she knew she’d hurt him and even though it turned out Constance could heal him the moment they were out and free, Anne had caused it in the first place.

“I can’t touch you,” Anne says, and it’s as much for herself as for Constance, she thinks.

Constance’s mouth twists, and she lays her hand down on the dirty surface of the table between them.

“Go on,” she says. “You won’t hurt me, and if you do, I can fix it.”

Anne looks at her, and then at Constance’s hand, pale in the bright sunlight that isn’t warm yet, but has something hopeful in it. She’s full of intent when she slides her hand over the table, thinking how all she’d have to do is push down slightly and it would splinter into bits, and then her fingertips are touching Constance’s, the slightest of touches, and she imagines Constance’s fingers breaking and her nails splitting and everything wrecked and bloody but Constance doesn’t pull away and, for a handful of seconds that feel like an hour, Anne doesn’t either.

She wants to cradle her hand to her chest when she does move back, protective, relieved and scared all at once.

“We’ll work up to a high five,” Constance says, gentle, and picks up their mugs to go back inside.

After a warring few seconds, when Anne thinks her chair is going to crack apart beneath her, there’s too many strangling tight emotions in her chest, Anne gets up and follows.


End file.
